(Project of the Historical Materialism Series at Brill)

Bogdanov – Ol’minskii – Our Misunderstandings (1904)

I added a link to a small pamphlet from 1904 – Наши недоразумения – to the ‘Main Works’ page. This is Bogdanov’s early intervention in the post-Second Congress’ ‘nasty squabble’ (i.e. intense debates regarding what happened at the 1903 Congress that resulted in a split within formerly more or less unified Iskra group).

It is a short pamphlet mostly aimed at the ‘new’ Iskra and its conspiratorial methods (yes, the sorts of things that Lenin and his proponents were accused of at the time). There are two theoretical engagements with the situation – one by Ol’minskii called ‘Our Misunderstandings‘, and it opens the pamphlet, the other called ‘Rosa Luxemburg Against Karl Marx‘ is by Bogdanov and it’s second to last.

According to Maryn Lyadov’s recollections, this was the first Bolshevik ‘attack’ after Lenin’s One Step Forward, Two Steps Back was out in print, a book where Lenin summed up his own interpretation of what happened at the Congress, but also, which is more important, what he understood to be main theoretical differences (not simply ‘misunderstandings’) between various groups without a fractured RSDLP.

Lyadov remembers that Noskov (a member of the Central Committee) confiscated this pamphlet from the Party printer and prohibited its publication. So the authors published it elsewhere and in a short period of time a few other feisty pamphlets appeared. These were all published starting around August 1904 (and into winter of 1905) when Bonch-Bruevich opened his own shop in Geneva: